Henriette Lazaridis Imagines Dual Adventures in 'Terra Nova'

Author of Boston Globe’s best-selling novel, Clover House, Henriette Lazaridis, shares with us her newest book, Terra Nova. Set in 1910, Terra Nova is a historical fiction that chronicles the incredible tale of Edward Heywoud and James Watts, two Antarctic explorers who are racing to the South Pole, and Edward’s wife, Viola, the woman who loves them both. While the men are journeying through Antarctica, Viola stays back in London and works as a photographer, helping with the women’s suffrage. Lazaridis explains, “I wanted very much to write a story about people who had reached the moment of seeing their rival’s flag at the South Pole and…knowing that they had been beaten in this race and who had to then face an ethical question, and so I always knew I wanted that Antarctic story. It was very important to me, and I was interested in who they would leave behind and what this person would be like… I was thinking about the artist who stays home and has to, sort of, feed her ambition in a different way because she can’t go to Antarctica with these men and is experiencing some freedoms while they’re gone, even though she loves them both and wants them to come home safely, but she’s experiencing freedoms that she doesn’t have when they’re there, and so I put her in the mix and then, of course, the suffrage movement was happening was swirling around London, England, at that time, and it seemed the logical thing to do to make her be involved in the suffrage movement.”

Lazaridis’ interest in Antarctica came from her immense fascination with British naval officer and explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, who famously lead his team on a fatal expedition to Antarctica in the early 1900’s. “Because of that, I’ve always had books about Antarctica lying around the house and really my whole life I’ve been, from time to time, picking these books up, looking at them, reading a few passages… it was always in my mind. I was always thinking of Robert Scott and of Antarctica, and Antarctica’s exploration, so some of the details I kind of just knew from decades of reading and looking at photographs and things like that.” She was then able to use that information to write in great detail about the harsh conditions that Edward and James faced while trekking through the Antarctic.

Along with Antarctica, Lazaridis also wanted to incorporate the art of photography in her story. “With these characters, the photography of Antarctic explorations is a big part of the appeal, honestly, if you look at the photographs…they’re beautiful, beautiful images… so that always interested me and I wanted, it came very early on, along with the idea of this novel was the idea that photography would play a role in the ethical question that these men, sort of, bring into their lives… and I wanted Viola to be the one who was involved in that, so I had to make her a photographer and have her in her dark room, developing these images and looking at these things…and so I wanted her to have that experience of looking at these images taking shape and seeing in them something that is not what she expects.”